Basic Trope: A character is stated to be bisexual, but is only ever show with a single gender onscreen.
- Straight: Alice is bisexual, refers to herself as such, and claims to have slept with both men and women. However, all of her onscreen love interests are men.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice says she's bi but is outright repulsed by women.
- Alice is stated to be bisexual, but she never has any relationship with women despite having slept with roughly 500 men.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is seen to date both men and women, but her relationships with men are more serious than those with women.
- Alice's Love Interest in the show is male, but he is treated as her sole exception, and all of her exes are female minor characters with occasional flashbacks.
- Justified:
- Even though Alice is attracted to both genders, she is only interested in romantic relationships with men. Thus, every woman she's ever been with are one-night stands.
- Alice's in a relationship with a man for the duration of the story and has no reason to cheat on him with a woman.
- That's just how it happens. Bisexuality only requires for a person to be able to experience sexual attraction to more than one sex at all. It does not require a person to be equally attracted to both sexes. A person can have one same-sex partner and ten opposite sex partners and still be considered bisexual (and vice versa). Alice is either more attracted to men than women, or she just happens to fall in love with a specific man.
- It's just a coincidence that Alice has fallen in love with more men than women — she chooses her lovers for their personalities, not their gender.
- Alice is a 1 or 2 on the Kinsey Scale.
- The setting is heavily gender imbalanced—there are more people of one gender to fall in love with than the other.
- There are far more straight and bisexual men than bisexual and gay women out there — Alice has a far bigger dating pool of male suitors than female suitors.
- There isn't much of an LGBT scene in Alice's town, so there's nowhere for Alice to meet other ladies who like ladies.
- Alice is closeted, so the gay and bisexual women she knows think she's straight and thus haven't asked her out.
- Alice is, for whatever reason, a non-practicing bisexual (she is attracted to both genders to varying degrees, but only acts on her attraction to one).
- Alice has only ever had one Love Interest in her life.
- Alice wants to start a family and have children, which she believes is only possible by marrying a man.
- Alice particularly attracts to either masculine-looking or feminine-looking person of both gender, and it's much easier to find gender-conforming people in her dating pool than Butch Lesbian or Camp Straight men.
- Alice has a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad and/or is a student in a boarding One-Gender School, so she has no choice but dating a girl.
- Inverted:
- Alices dates men and women in an every-other pattern.
- Alice's one partner is transgender; their coming out was Alice's Closet Key, and she remained attracted to them regardless of how they presented while they worked themself out.
- Subverted:
- The reason for the imbalance is made clear—her bisexuality was just an act for marketing reasons, or she was just mistaken for bisexual by someone.
- Alice is stated to be bisexual, her onscreen love interest is a man in the first season, however, in the second season, her girlfriend is introduced and their relationship is taken seriously in the show.
- Alice is lying about being bisexual.
- Double Subverted:
- Except that was a later retcon also for marketing reasons and she does date women, but far less.
- But it reveals later that her "girlfriend" is in Canada.
- She is closeted and treats her actual sexuality as very close friendships.
- Parodied:
- Alice somehow manages to forget that she is also attracted to women (or men).
- Alice's bisexuality is only stated in the script.
- Zig-Zagged: Sometimes Alice identifies as completely and utterly straight, other times as completely and utterly gay, rather than just saying she's bi.
- Averted:
- Alice is bisexual and is more-or-less attracted equally to people of the same or other genders.
- Alice isn't bisexual.
- Alice's lack of attraction to men is explained as her identifying as bisexual because she's attracted to some nonbinary people, not necessarily other women.
- Enforced: Moral Guardians have stopped Alice's sexuality from being as explicit as the writers wanted it to be, so most of female relationships have to be subtext or implied, whilst her relationships with men can be more blatant.
- Lampshaded: "No offense, but are you sure you're bisexual?"
- Invoked: Alice is bi, but only just came out. Because she was closeted before, she hasn't dated any women yet.
- Exploited: Bob points out that Alice hasn't slept with a man since he's known her, and they'll revoke her Bisexuals of America membership card if she doesn't do so soon. This should also fix his own need for sex.
- Defied:
- Alice, owing partially to OCD or OCPD always makes sure to keep her count of girlfriends and boyfriends equal out of a desire for symmetry.
- Alice starts a Polyamory relationship with her Gender-Equal Ensemble harem.
- Discussed:
- "I am actually bi, not like one of those that only say they are."
- "It's okay for bisexual people to have a preference, you know! I'm sick of people telling me I'm straight just because most of my exes are guys!"
- Conversed: "I thought this girl was meant to be a bisexual, but this is her seventh girlfriend/boyfriend in a row!"
- Played For Laughs: Alice constantly boasts about how many sexual partners she has had of several genders, but is actually a virgin, and a prude, who is never seen flirting with either gender.
- Played For Drama:
- Alice is a non-practicing bisexual, who struggles with an infatuation with another woman, but has trouble acting on said infatuation for religious reasons.
- Alice becomes depressed when she is rejected because of her crush assuming she isn't bisexual.
- Played For Horror: Alice is Depraved Bisexual and either Female Misogynist or Straw Feminist.
- Implied: "I am completely straight!" "What about that ex-girlfriend, Claire?" "She didn't count."
- Deconstructed: Nobody believes that Alice is bisexual anymore because she's never actually had a girlfriend, and has had three boyfriends this year. This leads Alice to become depressed.
- Reconstructured: Alice introduces the Kinsey scale to her friends, and explains that you don't have to be equally attracted to men and women to be attracted to both men and women. Her friends apologize for questioning her identity.
Back to But Not Too Bi.
